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Mothers of Innovation

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Mothers of Innovation Mothers of InnovatIon Geraldine Bedell MOTHERS OF INNOVATION Geraldine Bedell Mothers of Innovation Published by: Family Innovation Zone Unit 2, 1st Floor, Pride Court, 80-82 White Lion Street, London N1 9PF June 2014 ©Geraldine Bedell 2014 [email protected] Design by: Glenn Orton Printed by: Impress Print Services Ltd, 19 Lyon Road, Hersham, Surrey KT12 3PU Acknowledgements Huge thanks to Charlie Tims, for tireless research and determination to find mother-innovators of all kinds on every continent. Also to everyone at Family Innovation Zone and The Parent Zone, in particular Vicki Shotbolt for being so creative and inspiring, Alison Thomas for being so meticulous and Sabiha Chohan for extreme efficiency. Many thanks to Glenn Orton for the design. Thank you to Nesta, in particular to Jo Casebourne, Stian Westlake and Philip Colligan. Also to the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and John Mulligan. This report has benefited enormously from conversations I have had, not only with all the mother-innovators profiled but also with many other mothers and non-mothers, including: Fiona Adshead, Dawn Austwick, Birgitte Andersen, Emma Avignon, Adele Blakebrough, Elisabetta Bertero, Sarah Butler-Sloss, Dafna Ciechanover Bonas, Sara Cerrell, Sarah Douglas, Jackie Duff, Giles Gibbons, Sara Hill, Eleanor Harrison, Michelle Harrison, Sharon Hodgson, Melanie Howard, Lydia Howland, Jennifer Howze, Nick Hurd, Ella Jaczynska, Adam Lent, Carmel McConnell, Will McDonald, Kathryn Nawrockyi, Chris Parke, Sophia Parker, Gloria de Piero, Michelle Quest, Meaghan Ramsey, Julie Simon, Matthew Taylor, Glenys Thornton and Nick Wilcher. Charlie Leadbeater is probably not referenced enough in the text but to anyone who knows his work, the extent to which this report is steeped in it will be glaring obvious. That is the least of my debts to him. 3 MOTHERS OF INNOVATION CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: Molly Melching, Babou Olengha-Aaby page 7 1 NEW VANTAGE POINTs – POKING LIFE: 13 Mariah Ben Salem, Caroline Tomlinson, Babou Olengha-Aaby 2 VALUES: Pam Warhurst 23 3 EmpATHY: Molly Melching 29 4 JOINING THE DOTS: Karyn McCluskey, Vera Cordeiro 35 5 RELATIONSHipS: Mothers2Mothers 41 6 BUILDING ON RELATIONSHIPS: 47 Ayla Goksel and Mocep, Celia Suppiah, Justine Roberts and Mumsnet 7 OlD AND NEW: Bethlehem Tilahun Alemu, 55 Alice Taylor, Sofia Fenichell 8 MOTHERS AS INFLUENCERS: Sue Black, Jennifer James 63 9 CONVULSION AND GENERATION: Hawa Abdi, 69 Mar Alarcón, Michelle Shearer 10 MicROCREDIT AND BEYOND: 77 Olly Donnelly, Ewa Wojkowska 11 SYSTEmic INNOVATION: 83 Ronni Kahn, Cecilia Flores Oebanda 12 TimE IS ISN’T MONEY: Natalie King, Abbe Opher, 91 Marlene Sandberg, Emma Stewart and Karen Mattinson CONclUSION AND RECOmmENDATIONS 101 End notes 109 Bibliography 110 Contact details 112 5 MOTHERS OF INNOVATION MOTHERS OF INNOVATION 6 CHAPTER INTRODUCTION Too often, when we think about innovation, we make assumptions – that innovation is indistinguishable from science and tech, that it involves men (probably young men, probably wearing hoodies) and that it comes from special places: innovation hubs and labs and hack spaces with a steady supply of pizzas; design agencies with Post It notes on the wall, funky décor and beanbags; or from designated geographical areas – Silicon Valley or Silicon Roundabout. IN NOVATION does, of course, come from all of the above, but it also comes from elsewhere. To ignore that risks missing investment opportunities, and, at another level, the possibility of making a much better world. The cultural assumptions that surround motherhood might seem diametrically opposed to the cut and thrust of innovation with its hero- inventors and spectacular breakthroughs. Mothers are popularly thought of as nurturing, caring, exclusively absorbed in their gurgling infants. Motherhood is culturally imagined as routine, monotonous, safe. Innovators, on the other hand, are dynamic, focused, abstracted, quite possibly a bit weird. Both sets of prejudices are partial and sexist. Mothers are of course perfectly capable of being dynamic. And innovation is increasingly understood to be less a singular activity than a collaborative one; as much about repurposing and INTRODUCTION 7 MOTHERS OF INNOVATION recombining existing ideas and resources as coming up with entirely new revelations; and as much coming from outliers – remote communities and uncommon behaviours – as from the centre. Even so, there is something in the nature and culture of motherhood that most women would acknowledge is different to non-motherhood – and it turns out that this is actually rather conducive to innovation. This report looks at mother-innovators around the world, both commercial and social, and seeks to identify the skills and capabilities that connect them. These mothers are coming up with ideas just as people (even women) have doubtless done in all places and times. With increased economic opportunity and cultural freedom, they are increasingly able to put those ideas into practice in ways that change the world around them. This report is an attempt to understand mothers as a force for innovation, globally and across sectors: innovating socially, commercially and economically. It is our contention that there are connections between mothers innovating for their families by farming chickens in India and mothers innovating in tech in the UK. And there are lessons to be learned in both directions. Often the innovations that occur on the margins, in the developing world, offer new ways of tackling problems that may also exist in developed economies. The effective and affordable delivery of healthcare is a worldwide problem: hospitals and health systems in the developed world are creaking under the strain. But as highlighted in chapter six, HIV patients in London are deploying their own tacit knowledge to support the work of doctors and nurses following a paradigm developed by mothers in Africa. Motherhood is a vastly different experience for women even in similar socio- economic groups in Britain, let alone for women around the world. But some things are common. The world looks different when you become a mother. (This is also true of adoptive mothers). You are responsible for another human life, viscerally, immediately, and that forces you into a different relation to the rest of the world: your identity will never be the same again. And although in time you will recover most of your pre-maternal self, the very fact of having been forced to realign your perspective leaves you with a more contingent, less certain outlook. This may also be true for fathers, of course; but, for mothers, the physical disruption of pregnancy, birth, breastmilk and hormonal disruption is unavoidable, even before taking into account the differences in parental leave1 or the cultural assumptions that derive from centuries of gendered responsibilities for the primary care of babies and families. All that disruption can be good for asking questions – and innovation is as much about asking the right questions as it is about answers. If innovation is the process by which new ideas turn into practical value in the real world, then framing the question in the right way is much more likely to lead not only to a different idea but also the best way to put it into practice. Molly Melching, the woman behind a dramatic reduction in female genital cutting in Senegal, didn’t tell families to stop mutilating their daughters. That had been MOTHERS OF INNOVATION 8 INTRODUCTION tried already. Aid agencies had tried it, the Senegalese government had tried it. Molly Melching invited mothers to think about their human rights and those of their daughters. She found a way not only to look at the problem from the other side and, from there, to disseminate her radical but simple approach through a web of relationships until the innovation became systemic. It was mothers, their networks of kinship, affiliation and affinity, who took over and carried the innovation forward, to the point that female genital cutting is now viewed very differently in Senegal, and practised far less. The mother-innovators in this report share a strong sense of values. This is true for entrepreneurs in for-profit organisations as well as for those who have founded charities or pursued social innovations. ‘Motherhood forced me to ask, “what am I going to teach this kid about me? What do I stand for? What are my values?” says Babou Olengha-Aaby, the Oslo-based founder of crowdfunding platform, Mums Mean Business, which supports mother-led enterprises. Mother-innovators are united by a sense of contribution, of doing something that is valuable enough to undertake alongside bringing up their children, powerful enough to keep them going. They are also pragmatic. Innovators typically develop a problem-solving mentality, an ability to dodge setbacks and pivot to achieve their goals. A powerful executive can have thousands of people anticipating her every wish, jumping to her every email; but a mother can never be entirely sure her infant or her teenage son is going to cooperate. Motherhood engenders a useful degree of humility and the ability to live with failure, which is crucial to that ability to acknowledge that things aren’t quite working and change direction. A Japanese proverb describes resilience as the capacity to fall down seven times and get up eight; mothers cannot afford to be knocked sideways and stay down. They have to keep the end in view. The mother-innovators featured here are changing health, education, the environment and the workplace. They are innovating in tech, as entrepreneurs, opinion leaders and consumers. Taken together, they show that motherhood is not at odds with innovation; on the contrary, it is actively a spur to it. Many of the skills and instincts of motherhood, whether those are natural or cultural, are a positive advantage when it comes to innovating – and the report will draw out some of these. The capacity of mothers to innovate isn’t simply about the psychology of motherhood.
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